Speculation: Earthbound's rolling Meter

actually, considering this is the SNES we're talking about, what it's doing is basically drawing the number sprites something like this: http://i.imgur.com/P5qEJth.png
sprites in the SNES were not saved as animations, but rather as a bunch of images or image pieces in a big sheet. storing sprites for every frame of animations for all the numbers scrolling upwards and downwards would take up way too much space, so it's much more efficient to do a simple animation effect like this by drawing pieces of each number at a time.